The Jezreel Valley railway, or the Valley Train (, Rakevet HaEmek; ) was a railroad that existed in Ottoman and British Palestine in 1905 until 1948. It ran from the Mediterranean coast inland along the length of the Jezreel Valley. The historical line was a segment of the longer Haifa–Dera'a Line, which was itself a branch of the larger Hejaz railway.
The historical Haifa–Dera'a line was built at the beginning of the 20th century and connected the Port of Haifa with the main part of the Hejaz railway, the Damascus–Medina line. Like the entire Hejaz railway, it was a narrow gauge line. The last stop of the Haifa–Dera'a line within the Mandate Palestine borders was at al-Hamma, today Hamat Gader. Planning and construction took four years. The railway was inaugurated on October 15, 1905, and regular services operated on it until 1948.
Despite several renewal attempts, the line lay dismantled for decades until 2011 when construction started on a large-scale project to build a new railway from Haifa to Beit She'an along roughly the same route as the historic valley railway. A successor line was reconstituted as a modern railway in Israel in the 21st century. Israel Railways began passenger service on the New Jezreel Valley railway on October 16, 2016.
Historic railway
History
Early plans In the 1860s the deputy British consul in Haifa, Thomas B. Sandwit, proposed the construction of a railway from the city to Baghdad, through the Jezreel Valley, with a possible extension to Damascus. Sandwit sought to create a continuous railway link between British India and Palestine in order to increase British influence in the area, which was under Ottoman rule.
In 1865, Dr. Charles Franz Zimfel, a German-American doctor, engineer, follower of John Wroe and Zionist, proposed the creation of a railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem, which would continue to Jericho and end in Damascus, with an extension to Haifa through the Jezreel Valley. Zimfel surveyed the territory and became one of the first railway planners in Palestine.
Claude R. Conder, in his extensive Survey of Western Palestine, proposed the construction of a railway from Haifa to the Fertile Crescent. His plans constituted the basis for the actual construction years later.
Sir Laurence Oliphant of Britain, who hoped to facilitate Jewish settlement in the Gilead, proposed the creation of a railway from Haifa to that region, which would then branch out to Aqaba in the south, and Damascus in the north. From Aqaba, he hoped to further extend the railway to the Suez Canal. In his visit to Palestine in 1883, Oliphant changed his plans to what later became the valley railway.
Financing In 1882, a group headed by the aristocratic Sursock family attained a permit for the construction of a railway in the Jezreel Valley. The family sought to build a railway there to raise land value around the line, which was mostly family-owned, and to enable the cheap transport of goods from the Hauran, also owned by the family, to the Mediterranean Sea for export.
On May 16, 1883, Sir Laurence Oliphant wrote in the New York Sun that he had met with Mr. Sursock regarding the construction of a railway in the Jezreel Valley, and claimed that he could see surveying work as he wrote, from his home in Daliyat al-Karmel. Oliphant founded a company along with Gottlieb Schumacher, one of the founders of the German Colony of Haifa, and Georg Agger of Jaffa, which would find investors for attaining a construction permit from the Sursock family, and the construction itself.
On June 13, 1883, early surveying work was completed and Oliphant began to look for investors, both in Britain and Germany. In a letter he wrote to the Duke of Sutherland, Oliphant claimed that the construction of the line was extremely important both politically and economically, that it would eventually serve as the connection between Asia Minor, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt, and expressed fear that the line would be under sole German ownership. Oliphant and his peers advertised the line as extremely profitable for investors, estimating the gain at 34%, and promising additional permits to construct additional extensions, a modern port in Haifa or Acre, and a shipping company. For that purpose, Oliphant purchased additional lands on Haifa's coast, and in the Megiddo area.
Despite these efforts, the plans failed—the British government, the only one interested in the project, sent the Duke of Sutherland to inspect it, who refused to help sponsor the project. The Lebanese families headed by Sursock, who wished to build the railway for their personal needs, also failed to raise the necessary funds. At the end of 1884, the Sursocks' permit expired, and the 50,000 francs deposited by Oliphant's company to the Sultan Abdul Hamid II were also lost.
Syria Ottoman Railway Company
On May 13, 1890, the Ottoman authorities gave a permit to build a railway line from Haifa to Damascus to the public servant Shukri Bey and a Christian Lebanese engineer and effendi named Yusuf Elias, both of whom worked for the Ottoman government. The line was meant to go from Acre to Damascus with spurs to Haifa and Bosra. Elias did not have the ability to gather the funds necessary for such a project, and it was agreed that he would buy out Shukri's share and sell the rights to John Robert Pilling, a British entrepreneur. Pilling quickly founded an investment company, which was listed in the London Stock Exchange as the S.O.R. Ltd.—Syria Ottoman Railway Limited.
The S.O.R. based its plans on the original surveying work done in the area, and after a financial re-evaluation, the planned terminus was changed to Haifa, which had a modern deep-water seaport, compared to Acre's old shallow one. The planned length of the line, from Haifa to Damascus via the Golan Heights, with two extensions, was . Twenty-seven stations were planned. On December 12, 1892, the contractor George Pauling started work on the line, after an inaugural ceremony.
Work on the line was opposed by the Chémin de Fer Damas–Hama et Prolongements (DHP), a standard gauge railway that carried freight between Damascus and Hama. The DHP did everything in its power to prevent the construction of the line in order to avoid competition. At the same time, the DHP petitioned the Ottoman government for its own permit to build a railway from Beirut to the Hauran via Damascus, eventually attaining it.
The French began building their line quickly, and finished construction in 1895, while the British worked slowly. At the time of the Beirut–Damascus line's inception, Pilling's company only managed to build a special port in Haifa to aid in the line's construction. Eight kilometers of standard gauge railroad were laid, between Haifa and Yagur, and a 20 km dike was created for the next stage of construction. Due to the competition from the French railway in Beirut, the port of Haifa became less attractive to international traders and that, coupled with strife within the Syria Ottoman Railway Company, caused Pilling to go bankrupt and lose the permit for the railway.
The construction permits were given to another British company, and another ceremony was held announcing the resumption of works in March 1895. The new British contractor, Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, restored the Jezreel dike and construction resumed. However, in 1900, the Ottomans began building the Hejaz railway, and saw the opportunity to convert the future Haifa–Damascus line to an extension thereof. In addition, because of financial disputes between the Ottoman authorities and DHP, and DHP's delaying of transporting construction materials for the Haifa line through their own railways, the Ottomans wanted to have their own railway line to the Mediterranean. In 1902, the Ottoman authorities revoked S.O.R.'s permit for a compensation of 155,000 Turkish lira.
While Sultan Abdul Hamid II's original plans for the Hejaz railway did not include an extension to Haifa, the construction of such an extension was logical in order to assert Ottoman control over the section between the Hauran and the Mediterranean Sea, and to compete against the French-owned Beirut–Damascus railway. German engineer Heinrich August Meissner who oversaw the construction of the Hejaz railway, considered the planned section immediately south of Damascus (Damascus–Muzeirib) to be useless, because of the French railway using the same route. After failing to acquire the French railway lines, Meissner signed a deal with the French that would allow a 45% discount in transporting equipment from Damascus to Muzeirib necessary to continue building the Ottoman Hejaz railway to the south.
Despite this, the French constituted a monopoly on the railway lines of the area, and canceled the discount. Their trains were also not equipped to cross the sections of railway covered by snow in Lebanon. Several months later, Meissner reconsidered, and decided to construct his own railway line between Damascus and the Hauran, close to the French line. On September 1, 1902, the Damascus–Daraa line was completed, and turned the Hauran from a remote near-inaccessible location into a transportation center with two railway connections.
Upon the initiation of the Damascus–Daraa line, Meissner realized that it was still very difficult to transport raw materials to Daraa for the construction of the rest of the Hejaz railway, as most of the materials came with ships via the Mediterranean. Meissner decided in 1902 that there was no choice but to build an extension connecting the new railway to a Mediterranean port nearby. Haifa was chosen for its already developed port, and because surveying, planning and some construction work for a railroad had already been done on the proposed route.
Construction
Construction plans for the valley train were based on the earlier British plans. Originally, the line was meant to climb the Golan Heights next to the Samakh Stream, although later it was decided that the Yarmouk River would make a better route. In 1902, the Ottomans revoked the construction permit of the British company S.O.R., compensated them, and immediately started construction. The first phase was to narrow the gauge to the Ottoman standard in the 9 km already built by S.O.R.
In 1903, track laying began between Haifa and Daraa. The biggest challenge was the construction east of Samakh (Samakh–Daraa). The length of this section was 73 km and the height difference was 529 m. Eight tunnels were dug for the section, totalling a length of 1,100 m and 329 bridges and aqueducts. These difficulties raised the price of the Haifa extension by tens of percents. A meter on the Damascus–Daraa section had an average cost of 2,070 Turkish liras, while a meter on the Daraa–Haifa line cost 3,480 liras.
The line was finally opened with 5 stations in January 1904, between Haifa and Beysan. On October 15, 1905, the entire Haifa–Daraa section opened, with 8 stations within Ottoman Palestine. On the opening ceremony, when the first train left Haifa for Damascus, a monument for Abdul Hamid II was unveiled in Haifa, which stands to this day. The monument was built in Turkey at least two years before this ceremony, and was brought to Palestine by sea.
Under Ottoman rule With the construction of the valley train, it served mainly for delivering construction materials from the Haifa port for the continuing work on the main Hejaz railway line. The Hejaz railway was built for ideological, religious, and to a lesser extent military needs, and the Ottoman authorities initially underutilized its potential as a commercial venue. Over the years however, the potential was realized and the Jezreel valley line quickly became a major competitor to the French Beirut-Damascus line for transferring products from the Hauran to the Mediterranean.